Perhaps the more we use concepts shrouded in words as the means to defining "Truth" the more we encapsulate ourselves with built-in biases and illusions. ("Always learning, but never coming to an accurate knowledge of the truth".)
The more questions we answer, the more new questions appear behind those emerging answers. Of this, there seems to be no end.
Eastern thought, which has been around for thousands of years, tries to explain everything as being part of a whole. Each one of us is like a drop in a cosmic ocean, and in the end we will reach Nirvana when we lose our individuality, our egotism, by becoming absorbed into that ocean.
There is no separateness. Ego is the illusion that separates us, and the barrier that blinds us to the "truth". The Universe is like a giant web, where everything in it and comprising it is all inter-connected, so that everything affects everything else. Our purpose, then, is to become One with the Universe, or at least to become aware that we are all part of the "One" (At-one-ment).
This is the world of the Mystics, the Guru's, the so-called Enlightened Ones. These are the ones who have spent their entire lives "tuning in" to the universe, in an exercise of experiencing the Universe as One, so that their own beings will become One with the One.
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Western thought, on the other hand, likes to break the Universe up into smaller and smaller parts, and to measure everything. They have developed the Sciences, the Mathematics, the Technologies, the Vocabularies with which to comprehend this Universe in all its mind-numbing diversity and disparate parts. Theoretically, if they could just understand the nature and function of each of the parts, then they could understand the universe as a whole.
Time and Space, into which our physical selves are immersed, are precisely what gives us that sense of separateness, that I am separate from you and that tree and that dog and that stone. We say and feel and perceive, "I am NOT that." Our physical sensory apparatus are the instruments thru which we perceive the Universe "out there".
The Mystic tries to understand the universe holistically, including the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The Scientist tries to understand the universe from it parts, and then piece it all together as whole. I am not sure if they endorse the notion that the whole IS greater than the sum of its parts. (I suspect both yes and no.) In any event, I see the Mystic and the Scientist both trying to grasp reality, but merely from opposite ends of the same spectrum. That's why I think they should work together co-operatively, instead of being at cross-purposes, and discrediting each other so much of the time.
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The various "Scriptures" from around the world (eg. the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, the Bhagavad- Gita, etc.) have been wrongly construed and used all along. Historically, they became instruments of power, control, abuse, and the perpetuation of ignorance and myth, in the hands of despotic religious and political authorities.
IMHO, they should rather have been used as "tutorials", leading us inward, to the Spiritual Reality within. They should never have been positioned as "Rulebooks" and "Doctrines, Dogmas and Creeds". They should not have been utilized as justifications for wars and narrow-minded prejudices, death-sentences, ostracisms and the like. One could say that the "Scriptures" spelled the death-knells of "truth". The development of Creeds became the barriers to "truth", rather than the definition and explanation of it.
I believe that within the pages of many Scriptures from diverse times and places around the world there are contained many useful and guiding principals, which, if understood correctly, would lead us individually to worlds within (ie. inner realities). In that sense, I guess you would have to "label" me as a "Mystic". So be it!........But at the same time, I have a lot of time and respect for the Sciences and Mathematics. I believe that both will end up at the same place in the end.
To each their own. There can be no other way but each one travelling down one's own path to "truth". It is not a path of a straight line, for there are many twists and turns and changes of directions. It is more like a matrix, and we can run in any direction and still be there. It is not a path of destination and arrival, for we are not really going "somewhere". There is only the Beingness and the Isness of it all, and our becoming Awareness that is perpetual.
In short, let's all just have fun, being what we already are!
Rod P.
